Jay Carney: On second thought, I guess it’s possible that that Benghazi attack was preplanned

POSTED AT 9:34 PM ON SEPTEMBER 18, 2012 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

He was telling a different story four days ago, but now that the press is back in “what about Romney’s gaffes?” mode, I guess it’s safe to open the door a crack to a very obvious conclusion.

The White House on Tuesday explicitly left open the possibility that last week’s dramatic attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which left four Americans including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens dead, was a preplanned attack…
“There is an abundance of weapons, including heavy weapons, and there are certainly groups that carry those weapons and look to take advantage of those circumstances—as there are around the region and the world,” Carney said. He did not say whether such groups might be linked to international extremist networks like al-Qaida.
“We have seen circumstances in the past in other parts of the region where incidents that inflame opinion are taken advantage of, and exploited, by groups that have an interest in creating chaos and destabilizing their local governments, or attacking the West or the United States,” Carney said…
But Carney last week repeatedly blamed the video for the violence, including the attack on the consulate in Benghazi. “It’s not an assumption,” he said Friday, asserting that the administration had no evidence to buttress the claim that the attack was the work of extremists.

According to both a Libyan security guard who was there and an intelligence source “on the ground in Libya” who spoke to Fox News, there was no “protest” of the Mohammed movie in Benghazi at all. It was a full-on attack on the consulate from the beginning. I’m increasingly curious about why there’s such a discrepancy about this in various accounts; it should be easy enough to determine from survivors whether there was a group outside the consulate shrieking about the movie an hour or two before the shooting started. If it were only Carney and Susan Rice insisting that there had been a protest before the attack, I’d chalk it up to White House disinformation designed to buttress Obama’s “blame the video, not my policies” defense. But it’s not just them: A regional representative for Libya’s interior ministry also says there was a protest.

Meanwhile, the Breitbart crew may have solved the mystery of why security at the consulate was so weak. It’s hard to defend yourself when your top priority is keeping a “light footprint” so as not to offend the locals:

According to a source close to Breitbart News and high up in the intelligence community, the Obama administration’s policy following Muammar Gaddafi’s death has been to keep a “low profile” during a chaotic time.
For this reason, according to the source, American Marines were not stationed at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli or the American mission in Benghazi, as would typically have been the case. In the spirit of a “low profile,” the administration didn’t even want an American company in charge of private security. Blue Mountain, the British firm the State Department hired, was willing to abide by the “no bullets” Rules of Engagement (ROE), so were a logical fit for the contract. These sub-standard protections for American diplomats were signed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the ROE.
In essence, the Obama Administration tasked an unarmed British firm with security responsibilities that should have been handled by armed American servicemen, and it was all approved by the Secretary of State. Needless to say, the plan failed and an Ambassador was murdered, along with several others.

Krazy kwestion for the State Department: Given that the consulate had been targeted at least once before, how long were they planning to follow the “let’s be quiet and hope the local terrorists don’t know we’re Americans” strategy? Exit quotation from Mike Rogers: “This (the U.S. Consulate) was a place that was targeted months before with an IED (improvised explosive device). It’s clearly a target that they wanted to hit and they wanted to cause casualties. … It’s just too many coincidences here.”